We have an application that facilitates a process and the end result is printed pages of advertisements. The current implementation uses GDI+ commands in c# to draw the ads in a design environment, allow visual arrangement of the ads and print the end result to file.

There are a few areas in which our system should be improved:

The system is inherently RGB, and a mismatch between RGB and CMYK outpue causes some problems.

In GDI+ we lack the support for rich text. our system uses per line formatting which is not ideal.

If an input needs formatting beyond what our system offers, we have the option to give predesigned images. Our system is not able to accept vector designs (other than emf, for which there is no good designer with CMYK support, and conversion from other formats to EMF yielded no good results.

The better approach here is to combine established software such as InDesign/Illustrator with scripting. You can script from .Net as well as javascript IIRC. GDI+ is RGB oriented and if you need to use this it must be a intermediate step, then import your RGB data and convert with the appropriate CMYK ICC profile.
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Ken FyrstenbergJan 11 '13 at 15:32

Actually, some of our clients already use such combinations, and they turn to our software to get away from that. Long story short, independence is an important feature of our software and we have to keep it that way. Also, though the software has a graphics subsystem, most of the actual job it does is not graphics oriented and is a common business flow.
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AlirezaJan 12 '13 at 6:47

1 Answer
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Well, after reading this post I guess that the lowly WPF seems a good approach: it has full support for rich text, BiDi text, it is fully vector based, it is closely compatible with a printing standard (XPS), and now I know it supports CMYK.

I'll give it a try.

UPDATE: Wpf turned out to be a perfect solution for our problem at hand. We've already used it to create LOB applications, so little experience about its thorough document handling, color space handling, printing, xps ... features that facilitate desktop publishing.